Roadmap For The Information Superhighway Internet Training Workshop

MAP19: Gopher (Part Two)

"Nothing quite new is perfect."
Cicero, Brutus

There are three ways to enter Gopherspace:
  1. through a Gopher client running on your local Internet service provider's machine,

  2. through a telnet connection to a publicly-accessible Gopher site, or

  3. through e-mail (we'll talk about e-mail access in MAP22: Gophermail).
How can you tell if your local Internet service provider has a Gopher client that you can use? Easy! Just type at your system's command prompt, and watch what happens. If your provider has a Gopher client, your Gopher client's root menu will appear on your screen.

If your site does not have a Gopher client, however, all you will see on your screen after you type "gopher" will be an error message.

Fortunately, if you can't access Gopher through your local provider, you can always access Gopher through telnet. The following is a list adapted from the Gopher FAQ (1) and it lists the telnet addresses and logins for just a few of the publicly accessible Gopher sites: 

     Telnet Address            Login   Area
     ------------------------- ------  -------------
     consultant.micro.umn.edu  gopher  North America
     ux1.cso.uiuc.edu          gopher  North America
     panda.uiowa.edu           panda   North America
     gopher.msu.edu            gopher  North America
     gopher.ebone.net          gopher  Europe
     gopher.sunet.se           gopher  Sweden
     info.anu.edu.au           info    Australia
     tolten.puc.cl             gopher  South America
     ecnet.ec                  gopher  Ecuador
     gan.ncc.go.jp             gopher  Japan
Please use the site that is closest to you. Also, if you are in North America, please remember that the consultant.micro.umn.edu address is the most used Gopher address in the entire world (this is the address of the University of Minnesota's Gopher server -- the birthplace of Gopher). You might be better off if you telneted to another North American site.

Also, if your site is running its own Gopher client software, it is strongly recommended that you use your site's Gopher client software instead of telnetting into the public logon sites. Your client is set up so that you can use custom features not available through a telnet connection (i.e. mouse, scroll bars, etc.). You will also find that your provider's Gopher client will run much faster than a telnet Gopher client (1).

DIRECT CLIENT ACCESS TO REMOTE GOPHERS

As I said above, to access your root Gopher menu, all that you have to do is type at your system's command prompt.

Sometimes, however, you may want to bypass your own root menu and connect directly to a remote Gopher server. You can do this by typing

at your system's command prompt, replacing <site address> with the the address of the remote Gopher server that you want to access.

For example, to connect directly with the info.asu.edu Gopher I would type

at my system's command prompt.

LOCAL VERSUS DISTANT INFORMATION

Spend any amount of time in Gopherspace, and you are bound to run into roadblocks. The most common roadblock that you will encounter is an error message that says when you try to access a file or menu that you know exists (and that you may have even accessed just a few seconds earlier).

One of the biggest mistakes that people make is they assume that this "Empty Menu" error is a problem with their local Internet service provider's system. IT ISN'T!!

Your local Internet service provider is only responsible for the LOCAL portion of your Internet service. If you are having problems accessing a distant Gopher file or menu, your problem isn't with your local provider, it is with the distant site that you are trying to access!

There are two things that you need to keep in mind any time you are having problems with Gopher:

  1. Gopherspace is incredibly dynamic. Sites "appear" and and "disappear" every second of every day. Internet traffic, power outages, weather, scheduled repairs, and even squirrels affect whether a site is on-line or off-line.

  2. Sites can "disappear" for as little as a second or they can shut down and disappear forever. If you are having problems accessing something in Gopherspace, wait a little while and try to access it later.

UNIX GOPHER COMMANDS

Once you access your Gopher client (or telnet into a Gopher client), take a look at the bottom of the root menu. If you see a menu line that says You are using a UNIX Gopher client.

Fortunately, the on-line help menu for the UNIX Gopher is really good. If you type

your screen will fill with a whole bunch of UNIX Gopher commands.

I'm not going to show you all of these commands -- you can find them pretty easily by typing "?" -- but I do want to show you a few of the most important commands that you will use: 

     Key                        What it does
     -----------                -----------------------------------

     Up arrow                   Moves the --> cursor up one line
     Down arrow                 Moves the --> cursor down one line
     Right arrow                "Enters" the selected menu item
       or Return
     Left arrow                 "Exits" the item and returns you to
       or u                      the previous menu
After you have entered a file and have gotten to the bottom of it, the following menu bar appears Pressing "return" will just take you back to the previous menu. If you want a copy of the file, you are going to have to either press "m" or "s".

If you are telnetting into a Gopher client, or if the file is small, your best bet would be to type "m". The client will then ask you for an address you want the current document mailed to. Enter your full Internet e-mail address :)

OTHER GOPHER CLIENT COMMANDS

There are a whole bunch of different Gopher clients out there. Fortunately, they all work on the same basic principles, and they all have relatively good on-line help menus.

Access your Gopher client, take a look at your help menu, and find the keys or commands necessary to:

We'll talk about some of the more advanced commands in the next few lessons :)

HOMEWORK:

  1. Enter Gopherspace and play around :)

  2. If you REALLY feel daring, you might want to find Richard Smith's "Navigating the Internet: Let's Go Gopherin'" workshop archives. The workshop was a one-month workshop which taught nothing but Gopher :)

    The following are some Gopher sites that I found that have the "Gopherin'" archives. You'll have to access these sites directly -- type "gopher <site address>" -- and then hunt around the site for the "Gopherin'" files. 

            gopher-chem.ucdavis.edu            gopher.kfki.hu
        ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu              gopher2.nhm.ac.uk
        rc1.vub.ac.be                      wealaka.okgeosurvey1.gov
        gopher.keller.clarke.edu           ukoln.bath.ac.uk
        gopher.ub2.lu.se                   utl.library.utoronto.ca

SOURCES:
  1. From the University of Minnesota's Gopher FAQ, last modified on 7/25/94
    Go back to where this citation is referenced. 

   (\__/)  .~    ~. ))
   /O O `./      .'               PATRICK DOUGLAS CRISPEN
  {O__,   \    {                   PCRISPE1@UA1VM.UA.EDU
    / .  . )    \                THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA
    |-| '-' \    } ))
   .(   _(   )_.'         Roadmap: Copyright 1994 Patrick Crispen.
  '---.~_ _ _&                      All rights reserved.

                          The views expressed in this letter do not
                            necessarily represent the views of the
                             University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa.
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Updated: 1995-03-28, 17:37